By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
Jun 1, 20195 min
Guam Fire Department is in the process of procuring NG911, but may be missing out on the latest technology
It’s 2019 and the world has gone digital. But the current 911 systems in many U.S. jurisdictions including Guam linger in 1985, built on analog infrastructure. Click the LOL! emoticon.
“If only people knew how broken the current 911 system is, they would freak out,” said Paul Tatro, president of North American Operations at Carbyne (NG-911). “The whole 1985 system is built on infrastructure that had only landlines, so the system in the background takes you to the phone number and goes into a database to see where your phone number is registered, what address it is registered at.”
While the Federal Communications Commission mandates every state and territories to upgrade their emergency response dispatch to the Next Generation 911 system, jurisdictions that still use two- to three-year old specifications in their solicitations may be missing the boat. “When you go back to three years, it is like being in another lifetime,” Tatro said. “So think about technology — how it has changed since 1985. It has been dramatic. Multiple times it has gone through different types of iterations.”
As for 911, the future is in the cloud.
“Our company never participates in 1985 technology. We never develop a system that fits into the old infrastructure. We build our system to be completely internet-based protocol,” Tatro said. “You can look at all the big businesses in the word today— all their mission critical systems are in the cloud. Even the federal government puts a mandate that all their systems will be on the cloud, except for top secrets because, obviously, you do not want top secrets anywhere but where they are supposed to be — highly controlled.”
The newest available 911 platform is cloud-native that allows the call receiver to take the caller’s video on the scene and spot the caller’s exact location. “We get it directly from their cellphone, just like Uber and all these other current technology applications,” Tatro said. “All of these things that people think is somewhere of the future are now here.”
And since the system is built in the cloud, the flow of data is streamlined. “You don’t have to rely on triangulation of cell powers and all these kinds of approximation of their location,” Tatro explained. “We can also open a chat window on the caller’s cellphone. If for some reason they cannot talk — maybe they have a particular physical limitation or maybe they are in a situation where they do not want to make a noise — we can open a window and accept that chat information just like we do with their voice.”
FCC currently requires that providers of interconnected VoIP telephone services using the Public Switched Telephone Network meet E911 obligations. The current VoIP system, however, still follows a back-and-forth transmission. “They would take the TDM (time division multiplexing) call that comes in; they would convert it to voice inside the call center, process the call and revert it back to TDM to talk back to the customer,” Tatro said. “It is not native IP. It’s like a facsimile. They all try to fit the current technologies, retrofitting them in the old system.”
The newest available 911 platform is cloud-native that allows the call receiver to take the caller’s video on the scene and spot the caller’s exact location. “All of these things that people think is somewhere of the future are now here,” said Paul Tatro, president of North American Operations @ Carbyne (NG-911)
GFD could not be reached for comment as of this writing.
“If we hosted this solution in the cloud, you would actually be hosted in the State of Oregon and you would be connected to every highspeed connection to the island,” Tatro said. “So if a typhoon hits the island, the equipment in Oregon is not going to be susceptible to any kind of condition that is happening on Guam or any of other islands that.”
Migrating into the cloud will also be cost-effective, Tatro said. “Today, not only are you required to buy software, which costs several hundred-thousands of dollars, you also have to have hardware. You have to have a staff to manage the hardware. Then have to have backup systems. All of those come automatically with the cloud — resiliency, redundancy, multiple insulations—and you pay a single monthly fee.”
“When we go to the future, there is less money to be spent because there is less hardware. It’s a wise use of the taxpayers’ money,” Merrill said.
Tatro, however, acknowledged that the cloud-based E911 has yet to catch on. “The biggest thing with 911 is that, in general, it works,” he said. “They are victims of their own success. You hear the occasional stories. But if people knew what the infrastructure was built on, they would freak out.”